Fifa has good reason to fear Panorama's exposure of its World Cup 'dirty secrets'

A Panorama investigation into football's ruling body to be broadcast tomorrow will not be welcomed and may well scupper England's bid to host the 2018 World Cup finals

Fifa president Sepp Blatter announces at a news conference in Zurich that he was satisfied with the outcome of a corruption investigation which led to fines and bans for two executive committee members. Photograph: Christian Hartmann/Reuters

The giant modernist headquarters of Fifa, the governing body of world football, makes for an imposing sight above the centre of Zurich. Housing about 300 employees, it is encased in a kind of gauze shield that symbolises what many observers see as the organisation's impenetrability and detachment.

This temple of intrigue and machination sometimes appears to combine the bureaucratic obfuscation of Brussels with the paranoid control of the Moonies. This week, however, its opaque working habits will be placed under an unwanted spotlight.

On Thursday members of its executive committee vote to decide which nations will host the 2018 and 2022 World Cup finals. But before that international bonanza, there is the awkward matter of tomorrow's Panorama investigation entitled "Fifa's Dirty Secrets".

The programme is expected to add to the recent revelations about vote-selling and corruption that led to the suspension of two Fifa delegates. The timing, three days before the vote, has brought despairing complaints from the team behind the England bid to stage the 2018 tournament. They fear a backlash from committee members will mean England, which last hosted a World Cup in 1966, will lose out to a nation – perhaps Russia – with a less inquisitive media.

The voting system for selecting the World Cup hosts has long been cause for embarrassment. Fifa had, for example, intended the 2006 finals to be played in South Africa, but a narrow vote was swung in Germany's favour when the New Zealand Fifa member, Charlie Dempsey, abstained. Dempsey later claimed he withdrew under enormous pressure. What that pressure involved remains a mystery. All that is on record is that he had received a fax before the vote from the German satirical magazine Titanic offering him a cuckoo clock and a Black Forest ham if he changed his delegated vote to Germany.

This time round, Fifa must be braced for the worst. The journalist leading the Panorama report is Andrew Jennings, undoubtedly the world's most consistent and persistent scourge of corruption in sports governance. Jennings has become a familiar figure at Fifa's press conferences, where he specialises in asking inconvenient questions. Officials have learned to flee on first sight of his snowy hair. The one good piece of news for Fifa is that the controversial film he has made is only 30 minutes long.

The truth is that the venality and malpractice Jennings has spent years documenting could probably fill 10 such reports. No one can be certain, because if there is one aspect of corporate policy that the Fifa excels in it is secrecy.

According to Mihir Bose, an expert in sports administration, Fifa president Sepp Blatter "sees Fifa as the Vatican of sport and himself as a head of state". One close observer says that the professional staff in Zurich are competent and trustworthy, "but it's the committee members that are the problem. They are treated like gods. They fly everywhere first class, stay in five-star hotels, receive $150,000 retainers just for attending meetings and $500 a day expenses. They live in another universe."

But three years ago one official broke the committee's code of silence. John McBeth, the Scottish Football Association president, was about to be made Britain's Fifa vice-president in 2007 when he suddenly announced his intention to expose corruption. McBeth called Blatter a "tricky customer" and noted: "I know two or three [at Fifa] whom I'd want to count my fingers after shaking hands with them."

Unfortunately he indelicately identified the regions prone to corruption as Africa and the Caribbean. McBeth was then accused of racism by the president of Concacaf (the football confederation that includes the Caribbean), the Fifa vice-president and Trinidad businessman and politician Jack Warner, who is alleged to have made about $1m from reselling World Cup tickets in breach of Fifa regulations. Warner was ordered to repay the money. McBeth later claimed that Warner had once asked for takings from a match between Scotland and Trinidad and Tobago to be paid to his personal account. McBeth was duly ousted, with Blatter explaining that his declarations were "discriminatory". Fifa is dedicated to anti-racism, and any form of discrimination on grounds of ethnic origin, gender, religion or nationhood is "strictly prohibited and punishable by suspension or expulsion".

But not in all cases. In 2003 Fifa executive committee member Julio Grondona said: "I do not believe a Jew can ever be a referee at that level [Argentinian first division] because it's hard work and, you know, Jews don't like hard work." Grondona didn't lose his position. In fact, he was promoted to senior vice-president of Fifa. This is not just because antisemitism has become more acceptable in global affairs, but because Grondona wields enormous influence.

The way Fifa is set up is rather like a medieval system of fiefdoms under the rule of an elected president, whose authority is dependent on the support of his executive barons from the six continental confederations. It is therefore in the president's interest not to challenge the power bases that put him in charge.

Perhaps a more striking illustration of this dynamic involves another executive committee member, Nicolás Léoz from Paraguay. After the collapse of the sports marketing giant International Sports and Leisure (ISL) in 2001, with debts of more than £150m, even the Swiss were forced to investigate. ISL had bought marketing and TV rights from Fifa for the 2002 and 2006 World Cup finals for about £750m.

In court it was said that ISL had paid out £66m in bribes to various sports bodies to secure the rights and Léoz was found to have received two payments from the company totalling £85,000. The court was sitting in the Swiss city of Zug, but the workings of Fifa really belong on Planet Zog. On Thursday, Léoz will be one of the people who determines the destination of the two World Cup finals.

In 2006, the combined TV audience for the tournament held in Germany was 26.29 billion. An estimated 715 million people – one in nine of the Earth's population – watched the final alone. The revenue from advertising, marketing, tourism and ticket sales is incalculably large, but runs into the billions. In such circumstances, anyone involved in the process of deciding where the event takes place ought to be subject to the most demanding code of practice and standards of behaviour. Léoz's presence at the vote does not send out that signal. Fifa's only response to those who dare make mention of the unpleasant aroma emanating from the imposing grey block on Fifa-Strasse in Zurich is to attack their sense of smell. That was its first instinct when several current and former executive members were caught in a newspaper sting trying to sell their votes for upwards of $1m – a figure, incidentally, recommended by Slim Aloulou, the Tunisian chairman of Fifa's "disputes resolution committee". Well, that's certainly one way of resolving a dispute.

Alas, the evidence of malfeasance was so compelling, and so close to the vote, that Fifa had little choice but to suspend two executive committee members, Nigeria's Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii of Tahiti, along with Aloulou, Ismael Bhamjee of Botswana, Mali's Amadou Diakite and Ahongalu Fusimalohi from Tonga.

What makes such inducements that much more attractive is Fifa's inward-looking outlook, the atmosphere of princely untouchability that surrounds the organisation, and its unwillingness to root out systemic corruption wherever it is found, at the top or the bottom. It's an attitude that is neatly summed up in the words of the suspended Fusimalohi. "Although it's corrupt," he told undercover reporters, explaining the openness of some Fifa officials to bribes, "it's only corrupt if you get caught."

One analyst who has closely examined the competing bids believes that "four or five" delegates are prey to financial blandishments. That could be more than enough to decide, at the very least, where the World Cup doesn't go. But the analyst – who, like many people working close to Fifa, prefers to remain anonymous – is more concerned about political, not financial, corruption. "By any objective criteria, England has the strongest bid," he says, "but my fear is that there will be a carve-up behind closed doors. The problem is there's no transparency."